Video game development as a reinforcement while learning programming skills

Resumen

Introduction: The importance of the video game and interactive entertainment industries has continuously increased in recent years, and so the number of professionals employed by video game production companies. As a result, academia has introduced computer game development in its curricula, offering not only certain courses in existing grades, but also specific grades and master programs. Computer programmers play a key role in video game development. They have to implement the video game logic, graphics engine, physics simulation, etc to meet stakeholders’ expectations. If we add to this that the students are usually interested in video games [1], we consider video game development a good way to improve student’s motivation while learning programming skills. Development: Our proposal is focused in students of the first and second year of Computer Science degree in University of Cadiz, and consisted in two workshops (one in each semester of the academic year). In the first one, students learned how to program robots to compete in a Robocode tournament. Robocode is a well-known platform for [2] programing software military robots. Then, in the second semester students programmed a platform game based on Alan Turing’s life (one of the main contributors to Computer Science). They downloaded a simple playable version of the game, and had to add different features to make improve user experience. By starting programming from a playable version, students do not have to worry about the different settings and low-level configuration of the video game libraries. Each of the four levels inthe game offered a different challenge to work specific programming skills. Resources to repeat the experiences are freely available under open license in [3,4]. Results and future work: Analyzed results corresponds to students of courses of the first year of the degree. These students had a very low level of knowledge on computer programming when the first seminar was celebrated. As common data, in all analyzed courses approximately the 9% of the students, that hadcompleted the workshops, attended to the exam, and almost 50% of them passed the course. Moreover, the 33.3% of the students who passed the course with an average mark of outstanding were workshops students. As a future (ongoing) work, we are making new seminars on video game development for mobile devices and using social network services to offer different programming challenges during the year in English language (simple English, so students get used to a second language).